I like gossip as much as the next guy, but truth is better than fiction, and the state of the world is more interesting than Michael Jackson's funeral. A few recent news stories highlights for me that we are still crawling from the hell-hole that the Bush administration (and its rancid ideology) left us.

In 2005, the New York Times revealed that the Bush administration was wiretapping phone calls without a warrant. These include phone calls from within this country. Government agents and bureaucrats were listening in on phone calls by U.S. citizens despite a law that required a special court to review these privacy intrusions. People were outraged over this, but Bush walked out of this burning bush without a scratch.

Government investigators recently reviewed the wiretapping program. Here is what they found:

While the Bush administration had defended its program of wiretapping without warrants as a vital tool that saved lives, a new government review released Friday said the program’s effectiveness in fighting terrorism was unclear. The report, mandated by Congress last year and produced by the inspectors general of five federal agencies, found that other intelligence tools used in assessing security threats posed by terrorists provided more timely and detailed information. Most intelligence officials interviewed “had difficulty citing specific instances” when the National Security Agency’s wiretapping program contributed to successes against terrorists, the report said.

The report also hinted at political pressure in preparing the so-called threat assessments that helped form the legal basis for continuing the classified program, whose disclosure in 2005 provoked fierce debate about its legality. The initial authorization of the wiretapping program came after a senior C.I.A. official took a threat evaluation, prepared by analysts who knew nothing of the program, and inserted a paragraph provided by a senior White House official that spoke of the prospect of future attacks against the United States.

These threat assessments, which provided the justification for President George W. Bush’s reauthorization of the wiretapping program every 45 days, became known among intelligence officials as the “scary memos,” the report said. Intelligence analysts involved in the process eventually realized that “if a threat assessment identified a threat against the United States,” the wiretapping and related surveillance programs were “likely to be renewed,” the report added.

It gets worse. According to Associated Press, "The Bush administration built an unprecedented surveillance operation to pull in mountains of information far beyond the warrantless wiretapping previously acknowledged, a team of federal inspectors general reported Friday, questioning the legal basis for the effort but shielding almost all details on grounds they're still too secret to reveal."

Can you believe this? I do. I will believe anything at this point. The scandals of the Bush years will haunt us for years to come. Someday George W. Bush will be sworn in to testify about what he was doing in the Oval Office. If he tells the truth, it will not be pretty.

The culture of fear and obedience hit closer to home for many of us. We can't all relate to wiretapping and eavesdropping. But many of us watch the ballgame. The nice thing about baseball is that the action stops when each half-inning ends and the teams switch places. That is when we go to the bathroom or pet the dog or check our email or whatever. These breaktime activities take place at the stadium also (except for the part about petting the dog).

In New York, where the Yankees play, the stadium plays God Bless America during the seventh inning stretch. The team has been doing this ever since 9/11. Most of these performances are played over the loudspeakers through an old recording from Kate Smith. For one fan who had to go the bathroom, he got up to head to interior part of the stadium. But he was stopped by security who objected that he had the nerve to run to the can during the nightly patriotic moment. The fan was kicked out of the stadium. He brought a lawsuit under the First Amendment, and the City of New York settled the case in the amount of approximately $20,000.

The culture of obedience is all around us. Stand for the Pledge of Allegiance and place your hand over your heart. Do not move around during God Bless America. Don't you know this is the land of freedom? Do what you are told. This is why the Yankees fan got kicked out of the stadium. He disrespected America. At least that is what his detractors would say.

More than 60 years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court addressed this issue, in West Virginia v. Barnett. The Court determined whether public schools could force kids to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. The answer is the schools cannot. The Court's language on this issue continues to ring true today:

To believe that patriotism will not flourish if patriotic ceremonies are voluntary and spontaneous instead of a compulsory routine is to make an unflattering estimate of the appeal of our institutions to free minds. ... If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein. If there are any circumstances which permit an exception, they do not now occur to us.